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On a foggy night in late 2010 I made my way to one of these famously decadent bashes, where the valets were juggling black Bentleys and red Porsches, and the hosts invited me to try the Kobe beef they had flown in from Japan, the white truffles from Italy, the beluga caviar from Azerbaijan. It was hard to talk over the pulsating techno-beat, but I managed to engage in a chat with a twenty-something son of the farmhouse demimonde—he was a classic of the type, working for his dad’s export business (it always seems to be “exports”), wearing a tight black shirt, hair spiky with grooming gel....

Every day, M-PESA transactions in Kenya outnumber Western Union transactions globally. Every day, 60% of all electronic financial transactions in Kenya go through M-PESA, a flow equal to more than 20% of country’s GDP. Those big numbers actually represent a very small slice of the Kenyan money supply, less than 1%. But the massive flow of a small stock of money is statistical proof of the pent-up demand for a more accessible system of payments. M-PESA is a transactional rail that in four years has created a whole new financial ecosystem, much like the iPhone in Western markets.

“Mobile-led” payments markets with middle to higher levels of activity, dominated by mobile transfers including Kenya – over 90% of senders used mobile – Uganda (68%), and Tanzania (60%). And “limited” markets – those dominated by cash, and characterized by low levels of activity including DRC, Mali, and Rwanda. Zambia probably belongs in this last group, in that it has some bank activity but there is also a nascent mobile presence and a strong over-the-counter presence implying Zambia is not purely cash, bank, or mobile based.

To go from EndoStim to Eko India Financial Services—humming away in a garage in South Delhi—is to go from the most virtual of startups to the most conventional, but it is still striking how much they have in common. Eko’s founders, Abhishek Sinha and his brother Abhinav, started with the simplest observation: Low-wage Indian migrant workers flocking to Delhi from poorer regions had no place to put their savings and no secure way to send money home to their families. India has relatively few bank branches for a country its size, so many migrants stuffed money in their mattresses or sent cash...

However, learning is cold comfort to employees who are following an entrepreneur into the unknown. It is cold comfort to the investors who allocate precious money, time, and energy to entrepreneurial teams. It is cold comfort to the organizations—large and small—that depend on entrepreneurial innovation to survive. You can’t take learning to the bank; you can’t spend it or invest it. You cannot give it to customers and cannot return it to limited partners. Is it any wonder that learning has a bad name in entrepreneurial and managerial